


A Sweet and Proper Thing

by halotolerant



Category: War Horse (2011)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Character Death Fix, Cricket, Disabled Character, Edwardian Period, First Meetings, First Time, Horses, M/M, Retcon, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-14
Updated: 2012-06-14
Packaged: 2017-11-07 18:10:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/433918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jamie, taking a deep, shuddering breath and then sipping his tea, gave him a slight smile. And now Jim felt warm, warm through and through, and <i>awake</i>, somehow, as if at long last suddenly roused from hibernation and stumbling into the light."</p>
<p>In which Jim and Jamie meet, fail at introductions, read too much science fiction, get together, mess up, fail to appreciate the importance of the Agadir crisis, buy horses, try their best and fight a war along the way, and most definitely nobody dies *g*</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sweet and Proper Thing

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings Apply:** Non-graphic references to domestic violence 
> 
> Thank you elfwhistletree for beta, and thank you kindkit for telling me to go ahead and write it *g*

\- - -   
Part One  
\- - -

“Are you so bored by us?” a voice asked, and Jim looked up from his sketchpad, blinking.

A tall man had come to stand over him, his reddish-gold hair on fire with the sunlight, skin almost as pale as his perfectly pressed cricketing whites. From another college, by his colours, whichever one it was Jim’s own was playing today – he’d seen the action on the cricket pitch from a distance and wandered over without asking questions.

“I didn’t come for the score,” he answered, shrugging, offering up his sketch-pad.

He watched the other man’s expression as he took it in, the sketches of cricketers that covered the page, none of whom were human. Bears, foxes, badgers and a lean otter, all in their whites, were the ones captured in the action of bowling and batting, apart from where in one corner a rabbit lounged, snoozing, cap pulled down over his ears.

“That’s distinctly odd,” was the cricketer’s pronouncement as he handed the pad back, and Jim felt an unreasonable ripple of disappointment – he did not expect to be understood, not really, but it would have been nice – would have been, at least, aesthetically pleasing – to see this young man’s features soften into interest. 

“I was reading a book,” Jim said, the part of him that argued he did not have to explain himself warring with the urge to show that this was more than some kind of childish fancy. “'The Island of Dr Moreau'. There was a surgeon trying to turn animals into humans. It was quite, well, unnerving really, but I liked the idea of it, and I started thinking about our world, filled with animals instead. And that I found I liked that still better.”

The cricketer inclined his head slightly. “You are not fond of your fellow man?”

“I wouldn’t exactly put it like that,” Jim replied, without thinking of it, and then looked up, quickly, reassuring himself that if the cricketer had caught his meaning, he could scarcely say anything without implicating himself also. 

A delicate pink flush was spreading over the cricketer’s skin. He licked his lips. “Is that so?” 

\- - -

Jim never learnt the cricketer’s name, not the first time. 

After their brief conversation, Jim had waited in his deckchair, no longer able to sketch, as the final, seemingly endless innings drew to a close, his hands kneading at his thighs, his mouth dry and his blood humming too quickly. The pale cricketer ran well, with easy athletic grace, and at the end others swarmed up to him, ruffling his hair and shouting and congratulating. Jim would otherwise have had no idea who had won. 

He was not at all familiar with cricket. It had never been in his life. His parents, who had met each other during a demonstration about the Transvaal, believed in socialism, atheism and carbolic soap, in more or less that order, and his childhood had been so happy that he had no reason to doubt these principles. Until coming up to Oxford the preceding autumn, he’d lived all his life in their bustling terrace house in a distinctly insalubrious part of London, where two buildings had been knocked together to provide space for not only family but also group meetings, a printing press, visiting Russian lecturers and women fleeing their husbands with no other refuge. 

They were not entirely keen, he knew, on him going to Oxford, the breeding ground of Tories. But his school (a London day school, rather than some boarding hothouse, naturally) had encouraged him and he could scarcely refuse the place once he had it. 

And so, braced with knitted scarves from all the women in his mother’s discussion group, he had set out to meet the Class Enemy. Who was, he found, almost universally as awful as publicised, in a system he found stifling – being served in his rooms and at High Table made him uncomfortable, and seemed designed to create helplessness on the one hand, resentment on the other. 

This cricketer would be no different from the many swarming idiots of the upper classes, Jim was sure, but then who said they had to talk?

His parents believed in free love and free expression, and the universal brotherhood of man; Jim’s ‘close friends’, taken home to tea sometimes from the Young Socialist meetings, had always received warm welcomes, and with some of them he’d gone as far as breathless kisses in his bedroom, once he began to understand that this was what he wanted.

It had been Peter who’d taught him the rest of it – Peter, twenty-three and already a published journalist, Peter who could address a rally and have them screaming and weeping in five minutes, Peter whose visions of workers’ rule were only just less enticing that good looks echoing the most idealised Pre-Raphaelite imaginings of Sir Lancelot. 

Jim could laugh at it now, almost twelve months later; at himself so thoroughly infatuated that, though the man wore a ring, Jim had had to be told he was married before he grasped it. Peter had said that it didn’t change anything, that marriage was a snare constructed by religion and capitalism and that his wife was also free to do as she wished. But Jim - who not only wanted to believe this but felt he ought to – nonetheless could no longer enjoy being with him, and had stopped attending his meetings. 

Peter had introduced him to certain select bars and clubs in London, and Jim had had some interesting and educational encounters since. Watching the cricketer approaching him now, shouting some kind of excuse to his fellows whilst blushing once more to the roots of his hair, Jim was sure that he himself was the more experienced. 

Within the hour the cricketer was gasping under his touch, with broken words and arrested intakes of breath - “What? How can you..? How?” – and neatly confirming his theories. 

Jim had laughed, pushed him gently back onto the bed – they’d gone to Jim’s rooms, since Jim was leading the way -and taken the man’s cock back into his mouth. 

He was beautiful naked, just as Jim had suspected. Pale, lean, his chest dusted with auburn hair, gloriously sensitive to everything Jim did. Although he reciprocated nothing, Jim did not struggle to find his own climax, needing only a few strokes from his hand with the sight of the cricketer spent and panting before him, as he lay lax in the aftermath of pleasure. 

The moment had not lasted. Before Jim had got his breath back, the man had been getting up, searching for his wrist watch, mumbling about seminars and reading, scrambling into the discarded whites and almost bolting from the room. 

Jim filled his pipe and lay back in bed, picking up his copy of 'The Story of the Amulet' which was amongst several of E. Nesbit’s children’s books he’d slightly bashfully taken to university from home, and which he usually found soothing.

After a while staring at the same page, however, he put it down, reached for his sketch-pad and drew a rapid, sprawling impression of beautiful young man, arched in ecstasy, but with the head – as if he were some Egyptian god – of a crocodile. Then, setting his alarm to wake him for his meal, feeling less satisfied than he had, he fell asleep.

\- - -

“Get a taste for it at Public School, did you?” Jim asked, not unkindly, of the dark-haired young man (Harris, someone had said he was called Harris), trying valiantly to maintain a conversation despite the amount of alcohol he had taken – probably, poor fellow, to steady his nerves. 

Harris blinked, looked frightened, and stumbled away. Jim, relieved, turned to peruse the nearest bookcase. 

He was at one of Viscount Tully’s ‘Greek Discussion Club’ meetings, held in Tully’s very accommodating college rooms, and after a few hours of genuine conversation and not a little red wine, pairs of men were starting to make for corners as if in preparation for a complex parlour game.

Which in a sense, he thought, was more or less the case.

Pretending to study a book cover, Jim looked over the top of the volume to where Tully himself was pinning a slightly nervous young man to the wall, one arm resting almost across him. He would draw in a web, he thought, and give Tully eight legs, eight bristly legs and his prey beautiful, fragile wings. 

In truth, he liked Tully. Most of the titled students would rather have left the University altogether than have a self-confessed socialist visit their rooms. Earlier in the evening, they’d had quite a good talk, and Jim had found him politically well-informed, if almost paralysed with cynicism. (“But my dear fellow,” Tully had said, squeezing his thigh in a way that he managed to make seem only polite, “you see, I know these politicians you’re talking about. Had them all to dinner, sooner or later, dearest Papa has. And one can’t put much faith in anyone who one has seen trying to pick fish bones from his teeth.”)

“I was going to bring this to your room but I didn’t want to seem...” 

Jim turned quickly at the voice, which his body remembered even before his mind did, pulse quickening though it had been five weeks and two days, and he’d been sure he’d convinced himself to forget the whole thing. 

The cricketer was standing in front of him, rather stiffly, a package wrapped in brown paper held in front of him like a shield. 

“It’s for you, I saw it and thought...” the cricketer tried again, and flushed. 

“Thank you,” Jim said, because even socialists teach their children manners, and unwrapped it. 

A book, heavy and bound in green cloth, with 'The Wind in the Willows' embossed on the cover. 

“It’s about animals,” the cricketer said. “Animals who live like humans, I thought you’d like it.”

Jim, fighting a feeling far too close to delight, opened the fly-leaf and found inside: _Hopefully not unnerving. With regards, James Stewart, 1909._

“James?” he asked softly, and when the other man nodded he laughed. “You can’t be called James! I’m called James!”

It was not really amusing, but they both laughed at it for almost a minute. 

“Usually,” said the cricketer, “my friends call me Jamie.”

“Well I’m Jim. Jim Nicholls.”

They shook hands, Jim trying not to laugh at the quaint ceremony of it, when he knew what Jamie looked like desperate... He tried to quash that line of thought. 

“I knew Tully at Eton,” Jamie said, after a moment, looking around. “I knew he was in the same college as you, so I asked... I didn’t realise he was going to invite you to one of these.”

“Is there any reason he shouldn’t?” Jim asked quickly, a ripple of annoyance running through him – so he’d been summoned here, set up to come here, like anyone at these men’s beck and call. 

Jamie shook his head. “No, I just mean... Like I said, I didn’t want to suggest...”

I should like to make you say it, Jim thought. I should like to make you say ‘cock’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘please’, for once in your life to articulate reality instead of your polite version of it. 

He reached out, resting his hand on Jamie’s arm. “We could go and stroll in the quad, out in the fresh air, if you’d rather.”

Jamie blinked at him, and Jim could read in his eyes how easily he might get his wish. 

There was a tug, then, at his elbow; Harris had somehow found the co-ordination to return to his side, carrying two glasses of wine only moderately spilt on his hands. 

“I learnt a lot of interesting things at school,” he slurred, in a way he clearly thought to be enticing. “I’ll tell you more if you like.”

“Well, I mustn’t interrupt you,” Jamie said, quickly, moving away, and Jim was left holding the book to his chest in turn, trying to gently put off Harris whilst watching Jamie take his leave. 

\- - -

That summer, back home in London, whenever he got time away from the campaign work, with the window of his attic bedroom pushed as far open as it would go against the heat, Jim lay on his bed and lived on the riverbank. 

The thought of the river, of the willows and the bull-rushes and the harsh calls of ducks, took him inescapably back to Oxford, and sometimes he found his fingers had flicked again to the frontispiece, staring at the inscription and being carried away on currents he ought better to have resisted. 

\- - -

In his second year, the work required of him increased, as did the volume of literature his parents sent him; the press for Lords Reform was creaking forward, thousands of striking workers in America needed solidarity, and closer to home, they had started a committee to raise funds for a free dispensary in a sorely deprived part of Islington. He read what he could and wrote letters to MPs, and when a second invitation came for one of Tully’s parties, he dashed out a quick response regretting that he was far too busy. No further approaches were made.

He realised only latterly that he had walled himself in with paper, that in trying to concentrate he had withdrawn entirely. During those autumn months he had reduced his excursions from his rooms to the barest necessities of classes, library visits and the odd public meeting or debate, and from these he had got into the habit of slipping away once the speeches ended, rather than staying to chat. He had mortally offended most of the other students on his staircase in his first term simply by existing, and no one came to disturb him now. 

One evening, after giving up in sheer frustration on an essay – his tutor would not, he knew, agree with what he thought about the furious construction of battleships in the context of the overall economy, but to argue the expected line felt like perjury – he dug a familiar finished sketch-pad out of his drawer and ripped out the crocodile picture, stared at it a while, then balled it up and threw it in the corner. 

He went out then, slamming his door behind him. It was raining and he welcomed it, the cool water against his skin as he stared up at the dark sky, feeling empty and indistinct against the vastness. 

\- - -

It had become November, and the pavements were filled with slush, moved about with agonising slowness by wretched-looking street-sweepers, and the wind was bitter cold as it battered sleet down against Jim’s face. 

He was not in the habit of eating outside his rooms, but on this occasion the bright lure of the tea-shop window, promising shelter, sugar and warmth, drew him in, and he allowed himself to be seated, ordering a large pot of Earl Grey blend and some buttered tea-cakes. 

It was as he sat back and wiped his face that he finally saw him – Jamie Stewart, sitting in one of the booths towards the back of the shop, reading a letter. 

To leave, he thought, would be stupid, and really why should he? And yet sitting there, aware of the other man, waiting for the moment when he would notice him, anticipating what he might do, seemed impossible. He rose, therefore, and went over to the booth, murmuring a low greeting. 

“Jim!” Jamie was clearly startled. Closer to, Jim could see that he was upset, visibly fighting to keep control of himself. The letter trembled in his hand. 

“What’s the matter?” Jim asked without preamble, moving to sit next to him on the wide seat without a second thought, instinctive concern overriding everything else. 

Jamie swallowed. He was paler even than usual. Since the summer, he had grown a moustache and it made him look older, but at that moment his face might have been that of a child.

“My mother has died. My... my father is away, the housekeeper, Mrs Dawson – she is very good, very organised with things – she has written to me.”

Jim put his arm round him. There seemed, just then, to be nothing worth saying. 

Jim’s waitress, with a bored expression suggesting that undergraduate japes were more than old to her, brought Jim’s order to the booth table. After a little while had passed, Jim poured out a cup, added two sugar-lumps and held it out. Jamie’s hands were still shaking as he took it, the china clattering loudly in the silence between them. 

Jim waited until he’d sipped some before speaking again. 

“This was unexpected?” he asked.

Jamie ran his long fingers over the discarded letter, smoothing it onto the tablecloth. Jim took in the careful copperplate handwriting, the salutation – _Dear Sir, It is with regret that I write to inform you_ – and felt sick, that anyone should have to receive such news in such a way. Jim – with not only a plethora of flesh and blood relatives, but any number of unofficial ‘Aunties’ – could scarcely grasp that anyone could be so alone in the world.

“She didn’t eat,” Jamie was saying, slowly. “Whenever my father was in the house, she wouldn’t eat at all. He was there recently for the shooting, with his friends. All his closest friends.” He shuddered. “Mrs Dawson writes that Mama caught a sudden pneumonia and nothing could be done, but I am sure that if she had been stronger...” His voice cracked. “I’m sorry,” he continued, as Jim offered him his handkerchief. “You don’t want to know about all this.”

“My mother works for a charity which helps women who seek to leave the company of their husbands.” Jim said softly. “These things are common enough. It is better to speak about it.”

He was afraid, as he spoke, that ‘common’ might give offence, but Jamie only sipped his tea again, and nodded, slightly. 

“Now I must go home for the funeral,” Jamie said slowly, staring ahead, contemplating the task. “I’ll have to miss the end of term. Go and be with my father as he buries her, once and for all.” 

He frowned, and Jim saw the grip on his cup tighten, his knuckles turning white. “My father didn’t want me to come here. What’s the point of a degree, he says, if you’re to spend your life managing an estate? Mama didn’t like it either. She wanted me with her. I thought there would be time for that, after. I just... I wanted to be away, just for a few years, to be away from it. From them.”

Jim poured them both another cup of tea, and pushed over a tea-cake. “Write to me,” he said, unable to stop himself. “If, I mean, if it would help. Write to me over the Christmas and tell me how it is – I’m sure it will be awful, but at least...” He tried to think how to phrase it. “When I am angry, I draw. And when it is on the paper, it isn’t inside me in the same way.”

He scribbled down his London address – probably an area Jamie had barely ever heard of outside the Saturday illustrated papers, but that couldn’t be helped – and underneath that wrote his college one. He didn’t quite like to refer to the fact that, give or take the vagaries of memory, Jamie already knew it.

Jamie, taking a deep, shuddering breath and then sipping his tea, gave him a slight smile. And now Jim felt warm, warm through and through, and _awake_ , somehow, as if at long last suddenly roused from hibernation and stumbling into the light.

\- - -

Christmas Day in Jim’s family home always involved a morning spent assisting at the soup kitchen – where roast meat was, for one day, added to the menu – usually accompanied by a stern lecture from his father about considering those who had less than oneself. When Jim had been very small, there had been no decorations and no presents but as he and his elder sister had grown up and become more aware of their school-fellows’ excitement, they had successfully pleaded for both, and it had become a feast day for hospitality more than anything, encompassing whoever was in the house, neighbours and friends and any other waifs and strays who might otherwise have gone without some celebrations to share. 

How alien, then, the world in Jamie’s letters seemed. 

Jim had worried that Jamie might have regretted the confidences shared under extraordinary circumstances, but a letter had come, and soon another. There was little of direct emotion, Jamie preferring to describe the details of day to day life in his house, which emerged to be Govern Hall, a large country residence in Devon, about which Jim found a substantial entry in the relevant Baedekker. There, Christmas had been a vast undertaking akin to mobilising an army, involving trestle tables, mass slaughter of fowl, ranks of servants awaiting small presents, regimentally correct silverware and strictly defined etiquette. Jamie had perforce attended several balls – he wrote of these as hideously boring – and there had been the Boxing Day Hunt, the only event he spoke of with any real relish.

And yet these were not mere lists. Between the lines, Jamie was trying to say something, Jim knew, and he read the letters again and again, seeking to hear it. 

The funeral, Jim read about the most. It had been canvassed in short but descriptive sentences, the letters once or twice blotted by tears: _She looked as though she were asleep. I had never seen her sleeping, I dare say none of us present had. It seemed intrusive of us to be there in her peace, and a relief when she was gone, and hidden again._

From memory, though knowing it to be a bad idea, Jim sketched Jamie, this time intending him to have his own face rather than a reptilian interloper, but the details wouldn’t come. He could see him in his mind clearly enough, but it would not work on paper. 

Taking a fresh sheet, he drew the riverbank dwellers – the Rat, in his boating costume, the Mole in a velvet suit, the Toad in motoring goggles, and a whole bevy of different rabbits in gay country costumes. He sent it to Jamie, writing underneath: _It depends, perhaps, on your definition of ‘unnerving’._

“Are there any factory workers, then, in this riverbank?” his father asked, in a tone that was only half joking, having read the first three chapters. 

\- - -

Jim returned to Oxford in January, trying not to anticipate anything, but on the second evening back in his rooms, when a knock came at his door, he was up and across the room so fast that he knew the effort had been in vain. 

“I hope now is not inconvenient?” Jamie asked. He looked tired, dark smudges under his eyes. Jim realised that in trying to sketch him, he had not wanted to draw the sadness, and that had been the problem, for there it was, there it had always been, a feature as present as his mouth.

“Come in, I’ll make some tea,” Jim told him, and ushered him onto the small sofa. He had left a pile of books on a small table next to it, and as he busied himself with the teapot Jamie read out the titles with growing amusement: “'The Invasion of 1910'? 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'? 'The First Men in the Moon'? 'The Riddle of the Sands'? Do you believe all this stuff?”

Jim laughed. He did not often feel comfortable discussing the worlds of his imagination, but with Jamie it felt simple, easy. “I like the idea of the future, of how our world might be, or could be. And the war fantasies are part of that, and for a lot of people the main part. The future can be very frightening – people resist change because they fear uncertainty, and people seek war because they have been made afraid not to. I’m attending a debate this weekend on naval budgets, and I want to be prepared.”

“Know thy enemy?” 

“Something like that – sugar?”

“No thank you. Thanks.” Jamie took his tea, and Jim, after a moment’s hesitation he hoped was too brief to notice, sat himself down on the armchair rather than also on the sofa.

“I tend to read books about the past, it can seem...more relaxing,” Jamie admitted. “When I was a young boy, I carried my copy of 'The Children of the New Forest' just about everywhere. I wanted to live in the woods, and fight brigands and save kings. Or 'Robinson Crusoe', or 'Treasure Island', that I loved too – I really thought I might join the Navy, until my father told me ships weren’t made out of wood any longer and didn’t have sails either.”

“I’ve read 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde',” Jim said, thinking back with an agreeable shiver. “That was also by Stevenson.”

“I can’t say I cared for the look of it,” Jamie murmured, shrugging slightly. “The idea of a man possessed by his baser nature was...” he frowned, and winced, face wrinkling with some painful image, “unappealing.”

There was an awkward silence. 

“It was wonderful, to have your letters, and the pictures,” Jamie said at last. “I went into the town and ordered that Willows book from the shop for myself. I have to say I enjoyed it.”

“And the hunt – you said in your letters that you enjoyed the hunt,” Jim said encouragingly, just quickly enough not to stop himself from the sheer inanity of it. 

It was horrible, awkward; in the flesh and yet more distant than it had felt on paper, stuck behind tea and conversation, not saying at all what he meant which was: _I thought about you every day, every day I prayed to a God I don’t believe in to take some of your pain away, because there was nothing useful I could do._

“Well, I love riding.” Jamie drained his mug and then seemed confused, looking around.

“Oh, here.” Jim grabbed a stack of pamphlets from the nearest pile – perhaps unfortunately, they were on the subject of contraceptive education – and went to put them on the table. “Put the mug on them. I don’t really use saucers.”

The action caused Jim to lean forward, and he was now very close to Jamie, who looked up at him, his hand holding out the mug over the table, near where Jim’s was still on the paper. 

Slowly, Jim pulled the mug away, casting it down he knew not where, and slid his hand into Jamie’s, all the while keeping his gaze. 

“Please,” Jamie whispered, eyes wide. 

Keeping hold of his hand, Jim manoeuvred to sit next to him. “What do you need? Tell me.”

The flush crossed Jamie’s skin like ink soaking into paper. “Please. All this time, I wanted... I’ve been thinking of you.”

Jim leant closer, their mouths almost touching, his pulse humming, his skin hot, his body aching with it. Almost a year, it had been almost a year and how on Earth had he managed? 

“Tell me.”

“Touch me,” Jamie said at last, haltingly, and it came out husky from a dry mouth. “Make me feel like there’s a reason to be alive at all.”

And Jim kissed him, fast and hard, putting a hand in his hair and holding him close, drinking him in, and Jamie groaned under him. Then Jim kissed his neck, the base of his throat, got his shirt open and studied his chest, putting his mouth to a nipple, Jamie’s hands in his hair now, tugging in the uncoordinated way of one rapidly being overcome by pleasure. 

Jim put a hand between Jamie’s legs, and felt the heat pressing back against him, whilst Jamie made ever more wonderful noises. 

Getting Jamie’s trousers open, Jim shoved them down his hips a little, not wanting to delay doing more, and took Jamie’s cock into his mouth, finding it already damp with interest, a bright salt taste on his tongue that he sharply realised he’d thirsted for. As Jamie writhed and groaned, Jim sucked him down, moving quickly, scarcely aware of his own arousal in the face of the more overreaching hunger to satisfy. 

After no very great time, Jamie was thrusting blindly, crying out. Jim held his hips down but did not move away, and with a shudder, Jamie spent. 

Jim kissed the inside of his thigh, and then, moving up, the softness of his belly. Jamie’s legs were sprawled and open and he tried not to think of taking him, of how perfect it would be to be fully inside him, showing him that joy.

Unless someone – Tully perhaps, already had. Jim bit the soft skin under his lips, and Jamie moaned, trying to thrust again. Jim had never thought of himself as a particularly possessive lover, but he had never, ever, approached anyone before with such an urge simply to consume, to somehow get inside or take inside, until union of every kind could be achieved. 

“This isn’t right,” Jamie said after a moment, panting a little. “I can’t just lie here and let you... as if I were a woman.”

“I know you’re not a woman, believe me,” Jim said, the relief that there was nothing more troubling him making him facetious. 

“Ass,” Jamie said, sitting up. He was smiling now, and Jim felt the relief of that, although the heat between his own legs was growing ever more insistent.

“May I touch you too?” Jamie asked softly, leaning forwards, and Jim, understanding, leant back on the sofa in his turn, curious to see what Jamie might do. 

Jamie kissed him, slowly and thoroughly, in a way almost more painful than sweet in Jim’s current state, but then rapidly moved on, getting Jim’s clothes off, keeping the kiss going but getting his hand to where Jim was aching, and stroking, slow, almost elegant. A genteel hand-job, Jim thought, and chuckled. 

“Is this alright?” Jamie asked, worried. 

Jim kissed him quickly. “Harder,” he said. 

Something flashed in Jamie’s eyes, and his grip tightened. Jim’s own eyes closed, and he groaned with pleasure. Jamie quickened his movements slightly too, though still nowhere near as fast as Jim wanted, and started to rub his thumb back and forward over the head, a slight shuddering friction with each pass, until Jim’s thighs were quivering and he was thrusting up into the hold, desperate, poised on the brink and scarcely able to breathe.

He wondered who had taught Jamie that one; breaking the kiss, he leaned round to suckle and then sink his teeth into the muscle of Jamie’s neck, which had the happy effect of making Jamie’s grip tighten further.

“I was dreaming of this,” Jamie murmured, panting. “At home, I’d think: ‘If I can get through another day, and get back to him, these are all the things I’ll do to him’.” His voice lowered further still. “I’d sit there, all alone, and practice for you.”

And Jim found he was coming, sinking into pleasure, into peace.

“You have me now,” he said, sighing. Jamie had collapsed onto him and they were hugging together. “You have me now, and we have all the time in the world.”

\- - -

The growing spring and then early summer of 1910 Jim would remember later as a kind of idyll – forever afterwards, when reading phrases such as ‘Socialist Paradise’ and ‘Eternal Brotherhood of Man’, he would picture himself and Jamie, barely ever apart, in the delight of discovering each other. 

Outside the world rolled forwards – the death of King Edward, more turmoil in East Asia, more trouble in Ireland, birth, death and taxes the world over – but he struggled to care a great deal about anything beyond the two of them. The cricket season began, Jim attended Jamie’s games and even grew to understand a little of it. In his turn, Jamie began reading some of the books and pamphlets continually arriving in Jim’s rooms (in truth, Jim thought guiltily, more than he was managing himself). The dispensary plans had reached another level of detail, and patrons were seriously being sought but hard to come by – Jim’s mother wondered if there was anyone he could apply to within Oxford, and Jim did intend to get round to it in time, for all the good it would likely do – the urban poor might as well have been on another planet for all that the world of Oxford seemed to think about them. 

Exposure to Jim’s leaflets also revealed another fact about Jamie – that, after thirteen years of education at one of the supposedly finest establishments in Britain, he had not even been aware that unmarried women could get pregnant. 

“It might be useful, I suppose, were that the case” Jim said gently. “But it is not so.”

Their upbringings had been, he saw more and more, different in ways that went far beyond the principles of basic biology. Over time, with what Jamie felt able to share with him, a picture was growing that Jim could scarcely bear to think about. Jamie’s childhood had primarily consisted of being alone in a large house, fond of his mother but living in fear of his father’s infrequent and irregular visits, which left them both terrified. Often beaten, seldom praised, and aware in an obscure way that his very existence related to events his mother hated - she said far too often that she did not want more children and that in her state of health, really could not have any. 

Then school, an escape from the heightened emotions of home, but with little solace and the kind of easy, shallow friendships of small boys, none of which had matured into more, until, growing, he had become beautiful, and become courted, a process he welcomed, eager for any kind of affection. He had felt it to be wrong, because it had to be so secret, and because he had no model at home from which to presume physical closeness to be desirable, but it was something. 

He had never, in fact, he confessed, never before Jim, allowed anyone to touch him intimately. 

“But with you, I could not... When you spoke to me, I knew what you wanted, and I wanted it. And then I thought that if I stopped you, I would die.”

Jim had laughed at that, but kindly, cradling Jamie in his arms and nuzzling at his neck; they liked to sit so, Jim behind, reaching round to hold Jamie, who sat between his legs, speaking what he could, resting back against Jim’s skin when words grew too much.

Jamie had heard of buggery. He had never connected it to the warmth between himself and other boys, and gradually Jim understood that he believed it to be synonymous with, and inevitably, rape. 

“You might do it to me, if you liked,” Jim whispered, and Jamie twisted round in his arms – Jim had become aroused in the explanation and discussion, and the movements were no dissuasion – looking incredulous but, Jim could see, more than a little aroused himself. 

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t hurt me. I will like it. And you will like it even more, I think.”

Some while later, Jamie hot and hard inside him, shivering with it, Jim looked up at the expression on his face with gleeful delight and said “I told you so.” 

“Why haven’t we been doing this for months?” Jamie demanded, gasping, and even as Jim was laughing he moved, going deeper, and Jim’s breath caught with the perfect hot burn of it, with the bliss of Jamie there with him, against him, in him, held, captured and secure. 

Jamie fell forward, kissing him blindly, barely co-ordinated, and Jim cried out as the feeling suddenly changed from low burn to blazing. He pushed back, eager for movement, and put his hands to Jamie’s rear to drag him closer. Jamie choked and whimpered, as softly Jim urged him on, and when, at last, they lay together afterwards, Jim acted on an impulse that he feared his senses would soon tell him was foolish. 

“If I could ask you to marry me, I would,” he said. 

It was important, he believed, desperately important that Jamie knew himself to be loved, to be chosen, even if he found such a declaration ridiculous. 

But Jamie stared at him, blinking, his eyes suspiciously wet, before kissing him once, fiercely. 

“I would say yes,” he answered. 

\- - -

But the world is not a Socialist Paradise, or any other kind, and after Jamie’s graduation in the summer, he was required to return to Govern Hall, the responsibilities of his birth and the intermittent company of his father, who was less welcome at the court of the new king than he had been at the old, and therefore forced into his own domestic arrangements far more often than he, or anyone, wished for. 

They wrote to each other, generally several times per week, as Jim completed his own final year of studies, and tried to formulate what he would do next. His parents had their plans for him, lists drawn up with happy expectation, and he wanted to find the same joy in the work that they did, but it was hard to focus on anything when so painfully aware of Jamie, so far away and so alone. 

Lord Stewart’s annual autumn excursion to France (where, Jim easily inferred, he was more likely to be found at the Moulin Rouge than the Notre Dame) created the perfect opportunity for Jim to visit Devon for the first time, and he took the long train journey with ever-increasing excitement, having to fight on his arrival not to embrace Jamie too whole-heartedly as they met on the platform. 

“Thank God you’re here,” Jamie murmured in his ear. “I can be real again at last.”

Jamie was driving a pony-trap, and took him through the country lanes and all the way up to the impressive facade of the house. Jim noticed that the field hands they passed in the road doffed their caps, but of this Jamie made no acknowledgement.

Jim was amazed, and not a little horrified, by the sheer size of the building for one family, and yet he could not envy Jamie the place. It was partially shut up, the furniture under cloths, and the insides dark and dreary, without any indication of the lives or tastes of the inhabitants. Jamie seemed sapped by simply being there and it pained Jim to think of him spending his whole year so entombed.

His solace, evidently, was in the stables, which he lead Jim round with much detail and enthusiasm. One of the prize mares had a few months earlier given birth to a very handsome deep black foal, and Jamie – who had himself named him Topthorn – was full of his plans for him and his future career as a hunter. There, in the stables, in the scent of horses and hay, the stiff, cold Jamie of the Hall became quite another person, the person he had been, or started to be, at Oxford; calm and certain and, above all, happy. 

Jim kissed him, then and there, and Jamie eagerly responded, allowing himself to be pressed up against a brick wall. Jim was thirsty for him, desperate after many weeks apart, and before long they were lying panting in the straw. They had, in fact, only just righted themselves when one of the stable-boys came in, and Jim thought again of how odd it was, this set-up where Jamie had a huge private property constantly also occupied by people whose first names he barely knew. 

“The Yeomanry will like a fine horse for their Captain,” Jamie was saying, as if continuing a conversation of earlier without break, and Jim tried to look attentive and interested rather than as a man does when thoroughly sated and eager for a nap. “Not that the Imperial Devon are up to much – no time for practice and parades and all that – but a good example goes a long way.”

“Yeomanry?” Jim asked, and heard the stable-boy snigger, though whether at his ignorance or his accent, or simply because he knew full well that they hadn’t been discussing horses, he wasn’t sure. 

Jamie stared at him. “The reserve cavalry,” he explained. “Men from this estate, mostly, and a few beyond though they’re generally also our tenants. As local landowner, I’m their captain.”

“Captain of the regiment because you own the land?” Jim laughed with genuine astonishment. “That’s positively feudal!”

“That’s how we’re used to it.” Jamie frowned, and looked hurt, and turned away.

\- - -

It was at Govern during that visit that Jim himself rode a horse for the first time.

Jamie insisted on teaching him, and since it was far preferable to sitting in the house, and it was clear that the servants would notice if they spent the whole day in bed, Jim went along with it. 

He picked it up easily enough, and soon found its benefits – they could ride out past the paddock, over fields and beyond the horizon into the crisp autumn air, and find a quiet corner of nothingness and hold the warmth between them.

“Sometimes,” Jamie confessed one day, breathless and happy as they slowed from a mad dash, letting the horses cool down, “I pretend I am riding with Alexander in Persia. He had a great black horse, you know, as legendary as he was.” He smiled, softly and Jim urged his own horse forward, keenly wishing to be close enough to kiss him. “And a friend, a dear friend,” Jamie continued. “A friend of his heart who never left his side.” 

They leant towards each other, and there, in the red light of evening, they embraced. 

There was a thrill, Jim discovered, to be had in riding itself, in feeling at one with the animal under him, in covering the acres of ground so fast and furious, tearing up the very soil as he passed. 

And of course, it was idle, and pointless, and stank of the privilege he had always been taught to loathe. It was hard, very hard, to marry together that well-taught dislike with Jamie’s simple happiness, but it showed him, as perhaps nothing had before, just how very difficult changing the world might actually be. 

\- - -

“I would give it up, all of it,” Jamie whispered, as they lay together in the guest bedroom, the last night of Jim’s visit. “I would give up everything if I could be with you.”

Jim pulled him closer, and kissed him softly on his brow. Jamie was in his embrace, resting his head on Jim’s chest, one arm thrown over him, and Jim stroked his hair and then moved to bury his face in it, breathing deeply. 

He was already missing Jamie, already aching for him, even as the sweat cooled on their bodies. Their union had reflected it, struggling between fast, hard hunger and the wish to eke things out, to linger and memorise each second. 

It ought really, he thought, to be impossible, to be so desolate and so happy, both in the same moment.

He didn’t particularly want to discuss the impossible, but he rather thought Jamie wanted to hear him say it, so he sighed and did: “You can’t, though, no matter what you want. A Lord’s son can’t just move into the East End with a socialist sodomite, not without someone caring. Your father, for one.”

And then, because if they were going to talk about reality, they might as well drown themselves in it: “You’ll have to get married eventually, you know. The world must be peopled.”  
Jamie groaned, and hit him with a pillow; they wrestled, and fell again into each other.

\- - -

With Jamie no longer at Oxford, Jim found himself involved with more societies, and gradually finding friends and even a few admirers who were sometimes a great deal easier to talk to than Jamie, because he never found himself trying to edit his conversation so as not to be offensive. These were people highly conversant with the issues of Irish Home Rule, votes for women and Parliamentary reform, and who moreover saw these problems as desperately immediate, rather than some distant noise from a remote capital, barely impinging on the peace of an unchanging countryside. 

They were, in fact, people whose opinions were precisely the same as Jim’s and never argued with him or made him feel any form of doubt. There was, he was naggingly aware, something slightly weak about this preference, but if his opinions were correct, why shouldn’t he enjoy the company of those who shared them?

It was probably the same for Jamie, he thought, when he attended balls and hunts, and could discourse about horse breeding and wine keeping and the fashion in gloves, or whatever else mattered to him and he would feel unable to discuss with someone as uncouth as Jim. There, Jim was sure, pretty girls would cling to Jamie’s arm and never ask a single challenging question, only nod agreeably to every expression of status quo. 

There were occasions when Jim had cause to reflect that Jamie’s horse was better nourished than over half the children in London. 

But despite the voice of scruple, Jim himself was riding, hiring a horse at a local stables most Saturdays and setting off across the Oxfordshire landscape. In the glories of the developing spring, he enjoyed the scenery, the feeling of freedom, and also the almost tangible sense that were he to turn round he might see Jamie on Topthorn, racing along beside him, almost close enough to touch.

For all his friends, he was perhaps still too much alone. He thought and thought about things, and worried over his conclusions, lying in bed, lonely and uncertain.

\- - -

In July 1911, as Jim, having graduated, moved back to London, the British government, in response to a crisis in Agadir, categorically stated that they would support France were her interests to be attacked by Germany. Meanwhile, the newspapers were also busy reporting the confirmation that the vast irrigation canals previously observed on Mars had apparently been enlarged, suggesting even greater leaps in Martian technological superiority. Jim re-read 'The War of the Worlds' alongside 'The War in the Air', and hoped that they were equally fictitious. 

His parents – the dispensary project still in abeyance, in desperate need of funds - were already drawing up a tentative plan for a series of lectures on pacifism. 

Jamie wrote that his own father was more than keen for war – _he thinks that it may perhaps at last make a man of me. Given his own definition of ‘man’ to include the companionship of a certain type of woman on a regular basis, I fear he will be forever disappointed and I do hope he does not provoke the Deity into giving us war purely for my benefit. Topthorn, I am glad to say, is growing well, and you will not believe how he can jump..._

Jim looked around his small bedroom, and wondered if he could report, in kind, on the progress of a pigeon’s nest in the neighbouring roof. 

He drew Jamie as a Martian in a long cape and suitably alien hat, far away, in a grand palazzo by a Martian canal, and himself on Earth, the two of them reaching out to each other across the vastness of space. 

He could not imagine their future, how they could proceed or what on earth they could do, and the fact that the entire world seemed to be in the same quandary did not make it any easier. 

\- - -

Jim had not meant it to happen in the way it did, but somehow the words came out of him, as if having been contained so long, burning at his heart, they had finally broken out of their own accord without his will.

“I don’t understand,” Jamie said, and the look of devastation on his face made Jim want to say it was a joke, a terrible joke, a misunderstanding. 

But he’d said it for a reason. “Perhaps we should stop writing to each other. Stop seeing each other,” he said again, more clearly. He’d worked it all out so carefully, weighed the options and agonised, and had seen there to be no other way, but somehow now his eyes were prickling, as if it were a surprise to him as well. 

Jamie rolled away from him on the double bed, and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, no part of them touching anymore. 

“Did I do it wrong?” Jamie asked softly, still addressing the ceiling, and the fear, the doubt in his voice made Jim desperate to reach out and gather him up, to shower him in kisses and hold him safe. But the point was not to do that, and he crossed his arms, hugging his knees to his chest. 

“No, it was... it was wonderful,” he said, voice catching, and meant it. 

They were at Govern once more. It was September, and Lord Stewart was again away on the continent, not to return for his shooting for several weeks. Jim had been with Jamie for three days, with a growing sense of dissociation approaching a kind of panic. When they were both at Oxford, they had been the same, in many ways, or at least with some common ground to hold between them. Now, having come from London and the seething masses, to all Jamie’s empty property, he felt alien indeed. Every detail frustrated him – the silver at the dinner table, the ranks of well-fed horses, the abandoned rooms with so many household’s worth of furniture, and Jamie, who displayed no intention of actually doing anything, who clearly had treated his degree – something for which Jim and his family had scrimped and saved – as a kind of rest cure holiday. 

He was afraid to think that it might have been anger – not directed at Jamie so much as at the whole world – that in no small amount had moved him into finally suggesting that they switch places in bed, and he penetrate Jamie for a change. Falling early into a habit, they had never done so, and Jim had fantasized about it for a long time, but had always been loath to jeopardise the short slices of time they now had together with something that might prove unpleasant. He had planned – alone in his room, oh how he had planned – to make it slow and luscious, to show Jamie the sweetness of it, carefully and completely.

Instead it had been fast, him rolling out from under and pinning Jamie down, asking and moving as soon as he heard the answer. He had prepared Jamie, yes, but not for the hours he had contemplated, overwhelmed with the feverish desire that can come with despair, taking him as a drowning man grasps blindly at anything to hand.

It had felt extraordinary, and overwhelming, and as he came to himself again, and found Jamie, who seemed to have come all over his own stomach without being touched, turning and trying to snuggle into him, he had felt a hollow, terrible blackness, and had spoken. 

“Nothing is wrong that wasn’t always wrong,” Jim continued, trying to sound calm, when inside his chest was aching and the tears were coming now, spilling down into his mouth, salt and bitter. “Don’t you see it? Don’t you see how different we are? Did you think I would come and visit you here, in secret, for the next fifty years? Watch you get married? Play with your children? Have the servants laughing at me, and fuck, Jamie, servants, you have servants for every little thing. If you ever came to see me, my family, could you stand the fact that we do our own washing up? Make our own beds? Empty our own chamber pots?”

“You have never invited me to your home and I haven’t pressed you!” Jamie sat up now, eyes blazing. “Don’t you think I dream about it? Don’t you think I sit here, on my own, all the long stupid days and wish I could be with you and in the world you write about? Do you think it’s easy, being in my family, do you think I wouldn’t swap my life with the footmen at a minute’s notice?”

Jim bit his lip. “And leave your horses and your hunting and all your things?”

Jamie stared at him for a moment, mouth open. He looked as if he’d been slapped. Then, rapidly, he got out of the bed. 

“I’m going back to my room.”

He stood up, beautiful and naked and still messy with their coupling, and Jim ached for him, in every way possible. 

But it had been done, had to be done, and surely as time passed it would hurt less?

“I can’t be what you need,” he whispered at the closed door. “I can’t stay with you, would never be allowed to, whether I wanted it or not.” 

At breakfast the next day, Jamie looked tired, his eyes red and puffy. Jim said that he’d get the next train, would ask to be driven to the station as soon as he’d packed, and Jamie didn’t try and stop him, and Jim told himself firmly that that was for the best. 

\- - -

Part Two

\- - -

“Someone broke your heart, this summer,” his mother said softly, one evening as she washed the dishes and he dried them – a huge pile, they had had another dispensary committee meeting at the house, trying to decide whether to use what little capital they had to advertise for more. 

Jim’s eyes ached, and a lump came into his throat. He looked down at the tea-towel.

“No, I think I broke theirs. I was the one that...” He took a deep breath. “I’m like him now, not finishing my sentences. I’d just about cured him of it, actually.”

He’d never precisely told his mother about himself and Jamie, but in that moment he realised that she knew, that she’d probably always known. 

She put an arm round him, her hand trailing suds, and pulled him towards her. 

“I know it was the right thing to do,” he murmured, blinking fast. 

She sighed, and rocked him a little. “You can only do what you think best,” she said, but without, he felt, entire conviction, and then passed him another tureen.

It had not been until he was without Jamie that Jim realised how much he’d relied on him, even though they were so rarely together. How with so many of the little incidents of the day, he’d think about how he’d draw or describe them for Jamie’s benefit. The times when he would work himself into ridiculous knots of conscience over some issue or another, and imagine Jamie laughing at him gently, giving him back perspective. The amount of the day he spent simply thinking of him, imagining him, remembering him. 

All of that felt wrong now, and hurt, hurt far more than he had even expected. Autumn became winter, winter became spring, and he waited to become numb, to feel the relief he had expected, in knowing that his situation was no longer reliant on the impossible. 

\- - -

It was in February 1912 that Jim, reading the morning papers, having waded through yet more hyperbole about the German Navy, caught sight of the words _Lord Stewart of Govern Hall, Devon_ and learnt that Jamie’s father had died. 

It would have been only polite to write a note of condolence, but things had scarcely been left politely between them. For several minutes he sat gripping the paper, reading over and over the news, his chest tight with anxiety he could scarcely analyse. 

For Jamie was alone now, truly alone. Perhaps he scarcely mourned his father, who had never as far as Jim knew given him a kind word, but to have no one left in the world, to be an orphan? 

He wondered if they had spoken in Lord Stewart’s last moments. If there had been any peace between them. And it was more than wonder – a deep wish to know, to be assured that Jamie was alright. 

In fact, Jim tried to write, but the words wouldn’t come, or even pictures. Or at least, the pictures that did were of no use – Jamie, naked on horseback like the Grecian warrior he wished to be, riding out alone across a barren, blasted plain, vulnerable and yet magnificent. 

He left the abandoned efforts in the back of his sketch-pad, and tried not to think about it. 

He had discovered before that work could eat time and deaden the wider world, and now he sought it, throwing himself into more and more schemes. The days and months passed, and he could sometimes go hours together without thinking of himself, or Jamie, at all. There was a great deal to be doing – a patron had been found at last, for the dispensary, prepared to foot all the expenses, and through their agent, a neat little lawyer named Cardew, they had communicated an eager wish to break ground and get the project underway. 

Jim readily volunteered to be at the disposal of the committee and soon found himself elected to chairman of the board of trustees. There were building plans to commission and approve, decorative schemes to consider and often tactfully reject (Miss Fortescue’s ideas for murals depicting ‘the cavorting gods of Olympus’ and Mr Gregoric’s for some ‘worthy parables of Christ’ he could only finally quash by determining that all decoration would be strictly geometric, in line with scientific principles), and the coming prospect of appointing staff and purchasing supplies. 

He had even acquired a secretary, a Miss Helen Prangle, who was very good at her work and highly reliable, but who did like to spend their morning tea break reading out loud, in tones of quiet rapture, the society pages of the Daily Mail in a manner not quite in line with the ongoing socialist cause. She loved the descriptions of the clothes of society ladies, and to follow the progress of the London Season, the romances and rumours that always attended it. 

It was she who read to them, that July, the news that the new Lord James Stewart of Govern Hall, Devon, was engaged to Letiticia Halifax, daughter of Sir Robert, a midlands baronet. Miss Halifax’s dress and jewellery were described at much length, along with the beauty of her features and the perfection of her character. 

“Jim?” she asked gently. “Are you unwell? You’ve gone quite white. Can I make you some tea?”

“I’m fine,” he said stiffly, brushing her away. “I might... I think I might go for a short walk and clear my head, it’s a little warm in here wouldn’t you say?”

Miss Prangle, pulling her cardigan about her shoulders, nodded meekly. 

\- - -

There had been, in the ten months since Jim had last been with Jamie, a few occasions when unconquerable urges had driven him back to the obscure bars and discreet meeting-houses he had known before Oxford. Only once had he followed the thing through to the end, to actually disappearing into a backroom with another young man. Although it had been in no precise way unpleasant, it had left him feeling worse than when he had begun, not dirty but sad, and not only for himself but somehow for all of it, for all the poky corners, hidden rooms and back alleys in dinginess that was all they could snatch of the world. 

Had he wished for them instead, there were young women around also. He rather thought that Miss Prangle harboured a tendresse for him, no doubt fuelled by the fact that he was her employer and she liked that sort of novel. He wondered what she would make of his own preferred reading matter. A new work had emerged from the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, a story of a lost land still ruled by dinosaurs, and it had formed the basis of Jim’s new mental landscape – in his most recent sketches, an ichthyosaur rose from the deep, chewing and crunching its way through British and German battleships alike. 

The day he heard of Jamie’s news, once he’d returned home from the office, he drew furiously, covering page after page in giant reptiles, rampaging and crushing all before them, until his pencil lead broke. 

\- - -

Two days before Christmas, 1912, the foundation stone for the Islington dispensary was formally laid down by the local Member of Parliament, and soon the walls were beginning to rise. Mr Cardew continued to make regular but infrequent visits on behalf of his client, who remained anonymous. Jim supposed it was probably a rich widow, or possibly a man who’d made a fortune in the South African mines and latterly felt a twinge of necessity to do some good with his money. There was an added sense of celebration in his house that year, and soon it was 1913, Jim scarcely able to believe the onward passage of time.

War had come, but only to the Balkans, where battles had rumbled on like an uneasy volcano for months and showed every intention of continuing to do so. But by now everyone was inured to that news – it didn’t seem to change anything substantial, and the newspaper reading public were far more interested in scandals and shocks closer to home. 

“I, however, intend to join the reservists,” said Mr Cardew, one afternoon, as he and Jim concluded the latest round of paperwork. “I don’t want to get left behind or shoved into some service I don’t want when it all finally happens.”

“European war would be to no one’s advantage,” Jim said absently, repeating the conclusions he and his friends had reached many times in debate. “Everyone must see that. It won’t be allowed to actually happen.”

“The men I talk to, sir, often have a somewhat different opinion to that,” Cardew answered, screwing the lid carefully back onto his fountain pen. “And they’ll be the ones, you know, who decide when it comes to it.”

Jim looked up, interested. “You have such illustrious clients, then?” he asked. 

Cardew froze – it was for the briefest of moments, but Jim caught it. “I am not at liberty to discuss my clients, sir.”

After he had taken his leave, Jim sat down at his desk, staring at the papers before him without really seeing them, thinking about the timing of the patronage, about the paranoiac level of anonymity insisted on at every level when surely...

He ran after Cardew, finally grabbing him on the street and causing some passers-by to exclaim in alarm. Being still only early February, it was already dark at four, and he must have made a frightening figure coming out of the gloom like a man possessed. 

“Is your client Lord James Stewart?” he asked, almost shouting, and then, as Cardew blinked at him. “Is our patron, my employer, Lord Stewart?”

Cardew, lips tight, began to protest about his inability to answer, but Jim had seen his face and it said it all. 

Dashing back to the office, he wrenched open Miss Prangle’s desk and dug through notepads, a hardback book and a bag of cough drops to find what he was looking for – the Illustrated London Post, including a piece she had been reading to him that day whilst he attempted not to listen. 

_...and Lord Stewart of Govern Hall, (engaged as readers will recall to Miss Letiticia Halifax of Cromewell Abbey), who is spending the winter at his new London residence near Regent Street..._

\- - -

“Are you employing me?” Jim shouted, not waiting for a salutation, as Jamie’s butler opened the door to the living room in which he’d been put to wait (with a decidedly suspicious look from the butler in question), and ushered in his master. 

_Our master, _Jim thought, and his anger went higher.__

Jamie was dressed for dinner, in a suit perfectly and precisely cut, his collar very stiff and very white. He stood straighter, somehow, than once he had, and though Jim was tall by most standards, he found himself having to look up at him, which he had never been aware of before. 

Jamie, face perfectly composed, raised an eyebrow. “Can you tell me why I shouldn’t?”

“Why you shouldn’t..? Do you think you can just..?”

Jamie’s expression might have been painted onto a mask. “If you mean that it was indelicate to put someone who had been my friend into my employ, I will answer that I didn’t intend you to know, and I would be obliged if you would tell me what error it was that has resulted in your doing so.” 

Jamie stepped further into the room, and sat down on one of the luxurious Regency sofas, leaving Jim standing, which somehow left him feeling yet more at a disadvantage. “For the rest of it, I wanted to give to this scheme – having heard so much about it, I had long wanted to help, when I was able, which since the death of my father I have been – and it was the committee in question that appointed you, not me. You had heard, I suppose, that my father died?”

Jim forced himself to keep eye contact, though his cheeks flushed red and shame threatened to extinguish his anger altogether. To have even considered that Jamie had wanted to wield power over him for some kind of enjoyment was low, worse than low, and he should not have let himself think it.

“I saw the announcements,” he said, more softly. “I’m sorry.”

Jamie didn’t respond, but sat back, crossing one leg over the other. 

“I also saw that you were engaged. Congratulations.”

“It suits both mine and the lady’s purposes,” Jamie said. “I suppose that is worth congratulation.”

It had once been possible for Jim to read Jamie like a book – not anymore. The facade, the icy facade of propriety he had so bemoaned having to learn to adopt had come down, and Jim felt a wave of sadness for that alone. 

“Sounds very pragmatic.” 

“One must be pragmatic, or so I have been taught.”

There was silence between them.

If he had had in one word to describe how Jamie had changed, Jim would have said that he was older. Not just having aged another year past two-and-twenty, but become, somehow, a different generation, an adult where Jim still felt like a child. And why not? Why not feel that way, when Jamie had a house and the prospect of marriage, and Jim still lived in an attic bedroom drawing impossible creatures?

When Jamie could be calm, and proper, and behave well, a gentleman in every sense, and Jim threw tantrums, feeling as the years passed less and less able to control or even understand his own feelings?

“It is a wonderful thing that you are enabling,” Jim said softly, because so much was only the truth and had Jamie been anyone else, he would have been overflowing with gratitude to him as patron. “Now that you no longer have to keep away, you should visit the site some day and see for yourself. Or look over the plans and designs – I can easily send Cardew copies that...”

“I think you should show me,” Jamie interrupted. “You’ll be the one who understands it all best. If you will be so good as to send a note when you know what time would be convenient for you, I shall visit. Now, if you will excuse me, I must return to my guests.”

Jim wondered, afterwards, what might have happened if he’d been unable to find control. If he’d carried on speaking, had simply said how he felt, how being in Jamie’s presence affected him, even though he had no right whatsoever to do so. 

What might have happened, had he tried to reach out, and touch him.

But as it was, he had left quietly, and sent the note as requested, and Jamie visited the offices a few days later, formal and diligent, taking notes, and they spoke of plans and budgets and suppliers, and of nothing else at all. 

\- - -

There had never been a period of their lives before, Jim realised, where he and Jamie had simply been friends. 

Not that the term entirely described what they had become – ‘acquaintances’ might have been more accurate, people who met at work, always in public, who spoke of work and of things relating to it, with the merest diversions into the weather and mutual health. 

And yet there was an ease between them which he had not expected, nor really felt he deserved. Jamie had been the one to lead it, keeping his tone that brisk, slightly caricatured manner of the English Lord, determined and decisive (and yet without, Jim found, any more stubbornness or prejudice than he’d ever had), quite different from the boy who’d wept in Jim’s arms and with whom, therefore, it was possible to build a new bridge. 

As time passed, Jim found himself joking, teasing Jamie slightly, as a respectful junior might speak to an employer they know to be less frosty than they appear. The conversation widened, slowly but surely – they spoke of life outside the dispensary scheme, of books and music, even of politics. The things that Jim had avoided in past years, thinking they would lead to argument, often did provoke discussion, but it was enjoyable, challenging, forcing him to examine his own ideas and seek what he was really basing them on. 

He began to be able to look forward to Jamie’s visits as simple pleasures.

This, he thought, was how it should be, how he had known it ought to become. The two of them friends, with their own lives, intersecting only in the ways it was possible to do so. Each to their own world. Each to their estate. 

And if sometimes, in speaking, as they sat across a desk from each other, he would look up and wonder if Jamie might be looking at him, or if sometimes, as the months turned warmer, he would see Jamie tug at his shirt collar and recall, so very precisely, the soft indentations of his throat, and if, on occasion, in anticipation of seeing him, he would realise that he was edging into sensations he had no business with, then that changed absolutely nothing. 

\- - -

Part Three

\- - -

Jim’s mother said that she would help pack his bags, but she was too angry to do anything but sit on his bed, still arguing, and he did it, distractedly, walking past her again and again between trunk and wardrobe, the same piles of favourite books he’d taken to Oxford being carefully stacked for France.

“You don’t owe him this, if that’s what you’re thinking,” his mother said. She was flushed with emotion and the heat of the day, which in London had long since progressed from pleasant to stifling – a small part of his mind, aside from every other anticipation or anxiety, thought of the open green fields awaiting him and sighed in pleasure.

July 1914, and Europe was a house of cards, whose fall was as yet incomplete but already impossible to arrest. 

There was a strange kind of relief in it – in the fact that the war which had loomed, waiting to strike, throughout his adult life was finally just going to happen, the wave breaking on the rocks and, in starting, with some promise of an end. 

Huge numbers were joining up to various services, and he’d seen what he should do with a simplicity of purpose he’d not felt in years. 

It had been easy enough, once he’d explained that he knew the Major, to join the Imperial Devon Yeomanry. Despite his lack of geographical connection, the feudal principle – the fact that he worked for Lord Stewart – seemed entirely sound and proper to the officers he spoke to.

“It isn’t a matter of patriotism,” his mother said, running over again what Jim had heard increasingly at the lectures she was organising. “You could drive an ambulance, or be a dresser for the wounded, or continue the work here - it needs doing Jim, and just because a bunch of fools with nothing better to do want to shoot at each other in Europe, it won’t make the poor go away. Men volunteering this way, it makes them think this is what people want.”

“What people want doesn’t matter to them, not enough, you know that.” He stopped, collapsing down onto the bed next to her. She was close to tears and he hated to see it, didn’t want to discuss it longer than absolutely necessary. “Listen, I do owe Jamie something. I have wished that I had... that I had made more clear to him, once, my absolute respect for him. My liking for him. He does not... he has never been liked enough, not ever, you see. And this is loyalty, this is all of that, and in a way he can understand.”

“Like what?” she asked, in fury. “Like some knight swearing allegiance to Arthur? And then you all ride off on your horses, banners waving in the wind? What century do you suppose you live in?” She stood up, leaving his side and took a deep breath. “War doesn’t make men noble, or great,” she said softly. “Don’t you remember the South African wars, when you were younger, what happened there to the poor Boer women and children? And we gave the soldiers parades. People put flags out and waved as if they were proud.”

“I’m not a patriot, not that way,” he answered, looking up at her and wishing, suddenly and acutely, that he had made a better effort, earlier, to let her understand him. “This is for Jamie. And maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe we’ll mobilise and there will be no war, or some quick skirmish before everyone sees sense.”

She shook her head, and he felt a fool to have said the words even he did not believe. “I’ll make some shortbread for you to take,” she said, and left him. 

\- - -

“All I need now,” Jim observed brightly, some weeks later, having taken up residence at the riding school and barracks that was to be the regimental HQ whilst still in Britain, “is an actual horse.”

Jamie gave a short laugh, settling into a chair opposite him with his gin and tonic and copy of The Times, which was full of the news of the war which had now indeed been declared and was rolling slowly into full being. They were in the officers’ mess, with had the appearance and facilities Jim associated with what he had heard of gentlemen’s clubs, although Jamie and a few of the other captains had been full of mournfulness over inadequacies of chair stuffing, port vintage and paper provision. 

It felt, not a little, like being back at Oxford, not least in the way that he and Jamie were once more occupying the same ground, a lack of distinction between them that felt distinctly unsafe.

“Well, at least take the Sergeant with you when you go to buy one, for goodness sakes,” said Jamie. “Otherwise with your experience they’ll probably sell you a cow.”

Another officer chuckled, and Jim smiled, trying to take the joke in good grace. “A cow might not be bad at that. Few mounts can boast providing their own drinks cabinet.”

“It might confuse the Hun, I suppose,” someone commented, and there was more laughter. 

Jim looked at Jamie, who was turning his glass in his hand, watching the small slice of lemon as it was tossed on the currents. He was not laughing, and had probably not heard the conversation or barely even his own remark. Jamie was, Jim could see, horribly anxious, and doing his level best to lock it away inside himself.

“Would you like a hand of cards?” Jim asked, softly, leaning forwards and touching him quickly on the knee. 

Jamie blinked, and then, nodding, took up the offer. Perhaps it did not distract him completely, but as they spent a pleasant few hours between racing demon, clock patience and cribbage – all of which Jim had taught him, back in Oxford, back in easier days – he seemed to be able to lose himself a little in the game, and the lines on his forehead softened.

Jim’s bedroom at the barracks was two doors away from Jamie’s, and the building was spacious enough to allow each officer a room to himself. To be sleeping so nearby, to be aware that he could, if he had wanted, for any purpose, make a short journey and knock upon his door – this produced feelings he attempted not to analyse, but which nevertheless had sufficient intensity to eclipse almost everything else. Very little otherwise seemed real, more some kind of strange dream.

The war had started, yes. They were soon to cross the channel, yes. But how did any of that affect him when placed against the chance, once more, to smile with and comfort Jamie, and be his chosen friend? 

\- - -

It was after the horse in question had been acquired that Jim really started to think, as he had not particularly before, of what his mother had said, and the purpose of the cavalry in the battles that were to come. He hoped that there might emerge to be some complex strategy, or that they were simply to be divided up into small reconnaissance units, which he thought made a great deal more sense than aeroplane divisions, being harder to detect. 

Jamie, though, spoke of taking the horses into _a million German guns_ , and Jim, trying to match Jamie’s level of emotional control, saw at last, clear and distinct, the reason for his friend’s fear. 

For Jamie’s horse, the well-beloved Topthorn, was everything to him. He could be seen grooming the animal himself, more often than not, taking him out for daily rides simply for the pleasure of it. In the evenings sometimes, down by the stables, Jim would come looking for him and find him in Topthorn’s stall, giving another comb to his mane, hugging his neck, whispering to him. 

Who else could Jamie hug? Who else could he depend on to give him in some form the simple affection he had so long sought? Jim had long ago perceived that the match with Miss Halifax was of as little interest to her as it was to Jamie, and whilst the couple seemed friendly enough, they barely saw each other. 

As for the past as it stood between them, Jim refused to let himself examine it. He would not put the choices to himself again and try to weigh them anew. Considering himself then, and his ideas, was like considering a stranger, or a child who had acted in all ignorance and knew no better. 

And even to begin to imagine, now, that he might act differently... That was almost as useless as it was painful. 

There were moments between them, in those last summer days before they crossed the Channel, when perhaps they might have shared an intimacy. They began to ride out together, swiftly increasing to several times a week – Jim’s mount Joey having grown deeply attached to Topthorn, and the horses would naturally fall into step, or enjoy racing across the wide fields. The country bridleways were lined with bushes drooping with blackberries and they often paused to pick the fruit, which was luscious and sweet and left indelible purple stains on everything – often they were laughing. 

“In your world filled with animals,” Jamie said often, the subject having become safe between them again, “What job would a penguin do?” And so on, and so on through the whole menagerie, Jim trying to concoct yet more ridiculous answers for the joy of seeing Jamie chuckle.

And so though one or the other of them might have spoken of what was to come, or the greater confusion of what lay behind, perhaps they felt they had earned the peace of the moment, where the past had happened to other people, and the future could not be felt to be real. The world was quiet around them, endless rolling acres, and they passed quietly through it.   
That Jamie did not avoid his company, that Jamie allowed him to share in his rides, in his private time, Jim felt gratitude for daily. There was, in those days, a formless haze in his mind of something he might have had to admit was hope, rich and intoxicating as sunshine.

They were, in fact, out riding when the order came for them to cross the Channel and proceed to the France-Belgium border. They rode into the yard of the riding school to find a trooper waiting, holding it ready, his face all eagerness and enthusiasm, clearly expecting the same of them.

\- - -

In the cavalry charge at Quiévrechain, Jim fell. 

_Not yet_ , he thought, as he tumbled from his horse, reaching the hard chill smack of the ground, his head pounding, his fingers cold and yet somehow still gripping his sabre. 

The pain in his shoulder was dark, strong, blooming, rising and crashing over him like a wave, threatening darkness. 

_Not yet_ , he thought. _I’m not finished yet._

\- - -

The pain had to be a dream, and he swam up to consciousness, waiting to wake.

But rather than fade, the sensations intensified – the meagre, lumpy mattress beneath him, a cotton sheet rough and starched under his chin, around him a dim room filled with people, the sound of moaning, the smell of sour blood. 

And pain, excruciating pain, spreading out from his right shoulder as heat is given off by a flame. 

The fear came swiftly, more than he had been aware of feeling even as they raced into the German gunnery position. He was shaking, his breathing too fast, his pulse racing and thrumming in his limbs, worsening the pain still further. Instinctively, he tried to sit up, but the movement made him retch, the pain spiralling even to his guts.

Someone was trying to push him back down – he struggled, and they began to speak, and he realised it was a woman and that she was German. 

Shock made him acquiescent – he allowed himself to be guided to the bed, for his pillows to be rearranged under his head and then his sheet pulled up. Then he felt a delightful wave of coolness as the woman sponged his forehead, still talking in a way he did not understand. 

She gave him a cup, and he drank eagerly, only to spit out a horrible, bitter concoction. Vague terrifying thoughts of poison crossed his mind, and with it the sudden, strange realisation that he was not dead. 

Tutting, the woman raised the cup again, making encouraging noises, and out of some deep-seated training in obedience to a raised female eyebrow, he took it. She smiled and walked away, and as he watched her he saw he was one of several men laid on bed frames under what was in fact a tent, one end of which had flaps pulled back and was open to the fields beyond where the sun still shone – unless it was already tomorrow or the day after, or...

Stiffening, he looked round, raising himself up again – far more cautiously this time - to study his surroundings, even as he began to feel terribly sleepy. The pain was ebbing, and his limbs in general were starting to feel far away and not longer part of him, his eyes trying to close. 

His last thought was that there was no sign of Jamie. 

\- - -

He was, by his reckoning, in the German dressing station for at least eight days, during which he began to understand - thanks to a mixture of mime and the serviceable English of another nurse - that a bullet had shattered most of his right shoulder, and that nerve damage meant he could no longer move his right arm; it hung, when out of the sling, entirely limply at his side.   
To have lost all use of the hand that had for so long answered his mind so precisely, had drawn and written and done any manner of things he had always taken for granted, was a blow so deep he knew he had not fully understood it. He felt he ought to be devastated, and yet the subject seemed unimportant, numb and distant as the limb itself. 

It was unthinkable, and it had happened anyway – and so it was for so much. 

The wound, at least, which had been neatly stitched, healed well, and the dressings began to come away completely clean, the bright line of the scar knitting together. Jim was certain that the conversations the doctors and nurses had had about him – his name he started to hear with increasing frequency – involved transferring him elsewhere, no doubt a prisoner of war facility, now that he was well enough. 

They had been nothing but generous and kind to him, and he felt almost ungrateful to try and leave, but he could see that this might be his best chance. 

And if Jamie were by some miracle still alive, he had to get back to him.

It was not an exotic or exciting escape – he wandered out of the tent, as many did, going to smoke or simply see the sky. Most of the patients were German, and he had mingled with them throughout, not apparently exciting much interest. Managing to sneak around the back of the tent, out of the line of sight, he made his way rapidly into the trees and then walked on through a mixture of forest and farmland for hours, crossing two small streams in the hope of putting off any pursuers and then regretting it deeply as his feet remained wet and cold. 

He was forced to spend one night in the open, sleeping leaning against a tree trunk on what cushion of bracken he could gather with one hand. Exhaustion swiftly brought unconsciousness, but he woke abruptly to a pale grey dawn, mist hanging over the fields and the dew heavy on the ground, shivering with cold and his shoulder throbbing. Inspecting it gingerly, he realised that some part of it had reopened, the shirt stained with blood; it was burning again. In addition, his head was aching with hunger and thirst. 

Making himself stand, he walked on, until the forest thinned and finally, with the sun ascending towards noon, he saw a small whitewashed farmhouse before him. 

Breathing deeply through his nose, focussing on putting one foot in front of the other, he managed to reach it, scarcely worrying about his reception – there was nothing else he could do.   
In the vegetable patch before the house, a boy of not more than ten was weeding. He stood up as Jim approached, regarding him with a look of deep wariness. Jim raised his good hand to show it was empty and slowed his approach, in any case by now almost ready to drop. 

The boy shouted something in French, and from the front door a tiny old woman emerged, leaning heavily on a cane. 

Jim bowed to her, and made some attempt at “Je suis Anglais,” which was the limit of his French other than statements about the pen of his aunt. 

She studied him for a moment, then gestured, rattling off instructions to the boy, who came to his side – still looking deeply suspicious – and assisted him into the cottage and up a few stairs to a tiny garret room where he was relieved to see a bed. The old woman briskly removed his shirt and hissed through her teeth at the sight of his shoulder, sending the boy off to retrieve some cloths and a large bottle full of a thick black liquid which made Jim’s eyes water just by its proximity and which was agonising as she applied it to the wound in liberal doses. This done, she made Jim lie down and disappeared for a while, leaving the boy sitting in the chair, watching as Jim gulped down water from a pewter tankard. After a period, she returned with a poultice that smelt as if it had been dragged from the bottom of a pond, affixed it to his shoulder and, tucking him in, indicated that he should sleep. 

Jim’s fever returned for an uncertain length of time. He was aware of the old woman nursing him, of a cup held to his lips, of the sharp pain of the wound being tended, of the occasional other faces over him – another small boy, and an old man. 

He saw Jamie, too, over and over again. Jamie as he had been, and Jamie as he had become. Jamie crying. Jamie lying on a bloodied field, crying for him, reaching for him, as Jim turned away – in this dream he always turned, he would be riding a high horse and he would turn, and let it carry him away, leaving Jamie behind. 

Eventually, the world righted itself, his fever calmed and he began to be able to take in his surroundings. The elderly couple – Monsieur and Madame Cardin, he learnt – conveyed to him that he was now some way behind the German front lines. The small boys were their grandchildren, the sons of their son, who had been taken along with the boys’ mother by the Germans as they passed through. They had no idea why or where they had gone. 

They were in need of every possible help to run their holding, and no sooner had Jim left his bed than Monsieur Cardin was giving him work to do – fixing a whetstone to the table so that Jim could sharpen knives one-handed, teaching him to weed in one movement with a garden fork, sending him to hunt for eggs in the barn.

Occupation was more than welcome, and he relished it for itself besides as a way to pay back the family, who shared their little everything with him. 

But it left him with time to think, and one day, as he was carrying the milk pail across the farmyard, in the evening, with the earliest snows of winter falling about him and in the distance, the faint, intermittent echo of big guns, it struck him, full to the chest like a blow, that, for him, this was war. 

That though he and many had known this might come, he could not have predicted this particular fate, these circumstances, not in a million attempts. That he, who thought he knew the future, could have had no inkling of things beyond his own imagination – and what is the future besides conjecture? When it becomes the present, it is something else, something yet more unknown because one can only react, and finds that one does, and can. 

There were other worlds he could have chosen, he saw that clearly enough, and now, and for the first time, that perhaps certain choices might not have produced so precisely the results he had once predicted with such conviction.

The insight, just then, altered nothing. The winter closed in, insistent and demanding, he passed a very Catholic Christmas, and the spring came, and sowing, and it was summer again, before the aeroplane came.

\- - -

“It’ll be all the way back to Blighty for you,” the pilot said, not without envy, looking at his arm. 

It was like a scene from HG Wells, Jim was thinking. He had never seen an aeroplane before, not other than pictures in the newspaper, and here it was, the huge machine, just sitting in the Cardin’s wheat.

The thing had come down suddenly, a trail of smoke coming from somewhere in its belly, and Jim had run towards it, sending one of the Cardin boys for the drinking pail, ready to douse it in water. 

“I say, thanks,” the man who’d jumped out of the thing had said, and it was only then that Jim knew it was a British craft. “Erm, Mercy Boocoop and all that.”

“You’re welcome,” Jim had answered, laughing, and then it had all come out. 

The pilot – Lieutenant Frobisher – was on a deep reconnaissance behind the German front lines but did not in fact have an Observer with him due to, in his words, “Everyone having copped it apart from the chap who’s with the Captain” and therefore had a spare seat in his aircraft. He was more than willing to take Jim back over the lines, despite his lack of obvious use to the war effort.

Jim had thought he was now ready for the vagaries of Fate, but even so it was more than a little strange to be, less than a week later, walking through Charing Cross station from the Dover train, all aware and alone.

\- - -

Part Four

\- - -

The rain had settled in, and the small group waiting on the dockside were turning up their collars, hugging their arms round themselves and gritting their teeth.

Jim looked around him, seeing elderly couples and several young women, a few of them with small children. Here and there, men like himself – how much like, he couldn’t guess – standing a little aloof, not allowing themselves the murmuring about how soon it must be, so soon now, that the women periodically broke into. 

His sling had granted him a few respectful glances, but also looks that were more ambiguous. He understood – he had been injured in the war, no one could ever question him on that point. Whereas these men soon to arrive – their sons, husbands and brothers – had been captured and interred, and unless you made the leap of preferring a loved one alive to dead, there was apparently little glory in that. 

21st December 1918, and this was the future, the peace of Europe, happening around them, and it still rained, on the just and unjust alike. 

You couldn’t wait for the future, Jim saw that now. Nor could you live in thrall of it. It might change all your plans, alter your life beyond recognition, but around that, you had to make the changes yourself. You had to choose what you wanted, because, not in spite, of the fact that you couldn’t know if you’d get it or for how long. 

Although the boat had been posted to arrive at ten in the morning, it was past noon when they finally saw it, a speck across the Channel growing larger, grey and distinct, and finally seeing the name and knowing it to be the prisoner of war vessel, the excitement now rippling through the crowd, an elation with an edge of hysteria – it had been four years, what would they be like? Would they even be recognisable?

Jim blinked the rain from his eyes – his left arm had grown too tired to hold the umbrella any longer, and as no one offered to assist he didn’t like to ask – and looked at the gangplank as a gradual stream of men began to descend. 

It had taken several months of work, following his return to Britain, to discover that Jamie had been captured at Quiévrechain and taken to the POW camp at Gütersloh in Germany. It must of course have been a blow to him, to have his first and only action end that way, but Jim could scarcely care – in the relief of knowing he was alive, he’d wept, causing Miss Prangle, with whom he was still working, even more closely now that his writing was so poor, to become quite alarmed and make several cups of tea in a row. 

He discovered in the following days that only close blood relatives could correspond with the prisoners. Tracking down Miss Halifax, the closest thing he could think of that Jamie had, proved difficult on two counts – that she was now Mrs Horace and that she had emigrated to America, where her husband came from. Further inquiry revealed swiftly that the Mr Horace in question was a man of mixed race, and that it appeared that her engagement to Jamie had been to protect her from other arrangements until she reached the age of majority and was able to marry said Mr Horace without her parents’ consent. Jim wished her every happiness, but also that she’d left a forwarding address. 

In the end, he’d found a mutual assistance society for the relations of men imprisoned during the war, and soon encountered the wife of another Gütersloh internee. There had been nothing he’d felt able to ask her to include in her letter to her husband beyond greetings from himself to Jamie and news he was alive.

_Stewart says he is glad to know your friend Nicholls made it_ , came the entirety of the reply, and Jim could see from the ‘your friend’ that references to himself in a married woman’s letters probably ought not to be repeated. 

Now, he watched the men coming down the gangplank, staring through the rain, studying the drawn faces. They were all fairly thin, and there was a mixture of elation and fear in their eyes that well matched that in those who greeted them. 

He knew Jamie at once. 

Would have known him anywhere, his height, his hair, the way he held his body; it was a strange sensation, a thrill running through him, knowing Jamie was there, about to be close at last. 

Jim stepped forward, and Jamie saw him, eyes widening; he looked almost afraid. He came rapidly onto the dock, Jim stumbled forward again, and there they were, facing each other. Jim could see Jamie’s chest rapidly rising and falling, and felt his was the same, felt he must be breathing each breath with him. 

“You bastard,” Jamie said slowly. His face was pinched, more lines running around his mouth than there had been, but his eyes burned as they always had. “You bastard, I thought you were dead for two fucking years.”

Jim had a pain in his throat, his eyes were burning. “I wasn’t exactly given dispatches on you either.”

“And you’ve...” Jamie looked him over, taking in the sling. “Was that..?”

“The charge,” Jim confirmed. “I barely saw more of it than you did.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve no idea what happened to the horses, I’m afraid. I did ask the War Office, they rather laughed in my face.”

“I’ve some idea, I’ve seen it, over there.” Jamie closed his eyes for a moment, as if against the sight. He shook his head. “Never again.”

“How was it, in prison there?” Jim asked cautiously. “Some of the newspapers have been... irate.”

Jamie shrugged. “No worse than anything else, better than many. We’re alive, how many can say that?” There was darkness in his eyes as he spoke, a weight of guilt Jim could understand more keenly than he would have liked to admit.

“I couldn’t write to you,” Jim continued. “Not just – I mean, I can use a typewriter with one hand fairly well now, but I couldn’t... There’s a great deal I’d like to talk to about, if you’d like to, now we can do it in person.”

Jamie frowned at him. “Why shouldn’t I like to?”

“Because I’ve treated you abominably.” Jim said it plain and clear. “That’s the first of it, really. I realised, when I was wounded, that if I stayed alive for anything, it was for you. And that being the case, frankly I’ve been bloody careless of someone who means the world to me.”

He’d been determined to speak. Had to. If it was not acceptable, best to know at once, but he was certain, now, that words could not do any more damage than silence had.

The unthinkable had happened, and the world rolled on. Why not add another small miracle?

Jamie was staring at him, and Jim, turning, inclined his head and led the way to where he had parked his motor car, which he’d mastered one-handed with at least more ease than he’d mastered a horse. 

“If you’d like to go straight back to Devon, I can take you,” Jim said. “Or to a station or leave you at a hotel if you want to summon your driver – anything you want, wherever you want to go.”

Jamie followed him, still wide-eyed. He was, Jim realised, not without pain, still surprised to be offered affection, hesitant before it as a horse is with one he knows will whip him. 

“Where are you going?” Jamie asked, softly. 

Jim, hand on the door, met his gaze. “I have a small flat in Islington now, near the dispensary. It’s gone from strength to strength, you know, it’s wonderful, you can be proud of it.” He made himself take a deep breath. “So, yes, eventually, I suppose that’s where I’m going.”

Jamie smiled, just a little. “Let’s go there, then.”

He put his hand over Jim’s, where it lay on the car door. Jim wanted to reach out, to touch him back, to say in some small way how beautiful he was, in his forgiveness, his kindness despite everything but his good hand being trapped, he could only smile in response, and besides, it was too public anyway. 

Inside, under the roof, in the dark, cosy privacy that smelt of leather and oil, it became quite a different story. 

\- - - ~-~-~- - -


End file.
